> How come ad supported TV existed for decades without destroying children's mental health?
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
He mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog.
I've seen quite a few streamers that click through the text and don't care about the story.
It's even more common among playtesters. Ever noticed how some games seem to go out of their way to avoid any subtlety and repeat the major plot points at least 4 times? Or give way too many hints for the easiest of puzzles? One of the causes is that a game was playtested within an inch of its life.
Someone ended up optimizing for the kind of player who doesn't care much, because the playtesters didn't care much - they were only there for a paycheck.
But I've also seen a couple of streamers that can just scan entire pages into their mind in a second and click through text while retaining all the information.
I thought myself a quick reader, but even I was in a disbelief seeing someone read this quick on the first playthrough.
Game text is highly patterned. And since gamers generally can't be trusted to read long text, it's easy to extract the actually important parts, by design, if you practice it a lot.
It reminds me of one of the things I consider a secret programmer skill, which is the ability to watch logs streaming by at a fairly fast pace and still stand a reasonable chance of picking out the one log message that stands out and means something. This also depends on the fact the logs are highly patterned.
Perhaps more generously: reading the same story one or a few times carries more impact than reading it 300 times in quick succession. Especially when your goal that day isn't to find out what Atton Rand learned in his time fighting in the Mandalorian Wars; it's to walk to the right immediately after he finishes talking to confirm whether you can still fall through the deck-plating and into space there.
I'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue is gone whenever it pops up.
> There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring
I guess this depends on the genre. For point&click adventure games and visual novels, the situation that game dialogs are predictable and boring occurs much more rarely.
Fortunately, these days it seems more common that games highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so you at least get the important keywords.
I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay.
A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story.
Yeah, exposition overload is a rookie mistake a lot of writers make.
And video game writers in particular? Sometimes it feels like just having a Wattpad account could put you in top 50% of them. I've seen AAAs where saying the writing was "fanfic tier" would be an insult to fanfics. Like they either hire the cheapest people they can get, or give the job to someone like an executive's daughter with big ideas and no ability to execute on them.
A good writer knows the power of "show don't tell", and knows the value of keeping the audience hungry and wanting for more.
But to be honest, isn't this also true of the basic Hollywood or Netflix fare?.
I've been watching season 5 of Stranger Things. It has a budget of approximately 1 gazillion dollars. The writing is utterly basic predictable, boring, cliché, it's either a marvel-tier quip or a hollywood trope. Most Netflix shovelware isn't better than this.
My wife works a lot with LLMs and writing, and some time in episode 3 she was like, “I’m pretty sure a lot of this was written by AI.”
The long talking-in-circles conversations, especially.
That’s in addition to repeating everything several times, which is just a Netflix bad-on-purpose thing to account for people who aren’t paying much attention.
It's worse than previous series, I've noticed myself zoning out a few times, but the entire Stranger Things schtick is that it's a homage to the 80s. It's story lines are cliched, that's the point. They're predictable because you have seen them before.
They even highlight and play with it themselves in the show, introducing the big bad via the D&D table in the first episode of each season, referencing the films they're doing, sometimes including the same actors from the films they're riffing off (Sean Astin as Bob, Robert Englund as Victor Creel).
Season 1 : Aliens/ET
Season 2 : Goonies, The Exorcist
Season 3 : Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob
Season 4 : Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser
Season 5 : So far we've seen Home Alone, Lost boys, Terminator
Saying it's predictable and cliched is just saying they've done their job well! And missing one of the main points of the TV show. My friend was almost giddy that they'd used Technicolor in the Holly/Max world.
I tend to refer to this as a Mixtape versus Remix spectrum distinction. A Mixtape plays the "hits" in about their original form, just in a new order. A Remix might sample the hits, but adds in new original content and takes it in a new direction.
Personally, I bounced out of Stranger Things S1 pretty hard because it seemed far too much like a Mixtape and not enough like a Remix than I wanted. The part that hit me was a feeling that entire monologues were lifted from the originals nearly verbatim with maybe a couple Proper Nouns swapped Mad Libs style. That can be incredibly fun (one that worked for me: William Shakespeare's Terminator the Second, was a creative mixtape of Shakespeare dialog reordered to retell Terminator 2), but at least for Stranger Things I kept having too many moments pulling me out of the story with "I've heard this before" because of the worse follow up feelings of "I'd just rather watch the originals, because they did it better" or "This isn't really adding much new or original to this moment".
But I realize there are a lot of opinions in the Mixtape versus Remix spectrum and also a lot of opinions on where something like Stranger Things falls. If it feels more like a Remix to you, that doesn't necessarily change that I found it too much like a Mixtape. (And vice versa, just because I find it too much of a Mixtape doesn't mean that I missed things that others felt made it a useful Remix, just that maybe my opinions on Mixtapes are stronger.)
It's surprising that series and movies with gazillion-dollar budgets don't seem to have money for decent writers. About the only explanation I can think of is that the way the series or movie is made itself makes story too hard to do.
E.g. an action movie is designed around its stunts and then the plot is stitched together to support them. And series that are made one episode at a time can suffer from serious plot drift when they aren't planned ahead properly, or when executives can't decide whether they're going to have one more season or not.
Game writers need to learn about character development.
I never care about 99% of characters in video games. Characters need history that they don’t necessarily let up easily, deep seated fears that they don’t want to tell you, and subtle wants that they may be embarrassed to admit. Sure you’re still hacking and slashing but you’re also thinking “hey I wonder how this is going to affect so and so?”
Funny you mentioned Disco Elysium. I played the game when it was first released and had no audio dialogue. I read moderately fast, but I never skipped any dialogue and always explored all branches my skills allowed. It took me 40 hours to finish.
When audio dialogue was released I played it again and I couldn't stand the slower pace. It'd have probably taken 150h to finish the game again like that. So I switched to another language that was text only. (Btw, having a hotkey to switch between languages on the fly is AMAZING design).
All I'm saying is I'm agreeing with GP, going fast didn't mean I didn't care, quite the opposite as going faster meant I could explore more options.
Most of the time I wish games had an option to auto-skip everything that’s skippable (and just about everything that isn’t gameplay should be skippable).
I usually start a game intending to fully immerse myself in it, but the story part of the game usually doesn’t click with me. I’m playing Ghost of Yotei right now and it’s a perfect example of that. Super fun game, boring story.
Visual novels usually present an autoplay feature[1] which stops at choices, or just skips text you haven't met yet. The genre is famous for its multiple endings, even in the dozens, so a game can branch a lot and players re-play a game many times, so the autoplay feature is appreciated.
You can also set the text speed in many games, and there's a play log called history[2] if you missed something.
I've also wanted the reverse option. I tend to want to play the story first and foremost and get deep into that, but the gameplay keeps getting in my way. I still think a lot more gameplay content should be skippable, especially in games that work so hard to tell a deep story.
LucasArts' adventure games had a skip gameplay button. I remember using that the most in Full Throttle, but there were a few other places it came in handy.
Of recent games, I've felt this desire the most in Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 has won awards for its deep story. BG3 has a ton of writers that worked very hard on it. BG3 has some pretty complex to navigate dialog trees that I want to deeply and widely explore. Every time it drops me into combat I roll my eyes and often quit. I tolerate D&D's turn-based tactical combat socially with friends around a table or Discord/Zoom call, but I never want to Solo an entire Party by myself. It's just not fun for me.
It frustrates me that all of the stuff I find fun (the dialog trees and cut scenes) are skippable but the part I don't fun isn't (the turn-based combat). Sure, I can play other games with combat types and difficulty settings I find more fun, but it's weird that award winning stories in games are still inaccessibly gated to specific combat styles. LucasArts added skip buttons for everything and nobody cared, but now it is controversial to ask for combat skip buttons in games that have won awards for their stories. I find so many super fun stories with boring games attached.
(Sure mods/cheats help, and that's how I've gotten my furthest into BG3, but you don't need to mod in a "Skip Dialog" button. It seems silly to me that I have to manage a complex mod build or install an expensive cheat engine just to do something that is out-of-the-box for people that don't want stories. We all play different parts of games. "Combat" shouldn't be special in narrative-heavy games, I want to get deep into the story game and you want to get deep into the "combat" game. It's the same desire, just different, equally expensive, "sub-games" we are optimizing for.)
A big task my team did had measured accuracy in the mid 80% FWIW.
I think the line of thought in this thread is broadly correct. The most value I’ve seen in AI is problems where the cost of being wrong is low and it’s easy to verify the output.
I wonder if anyone is taking good measurements on how frequently an LLM is able to do things like route calls in a call center. My personal experience is not good and I would be surprised if they had 90% accuracy.
> have you considered that you haven't used the tools correctly or effectively?
The problem is that this comes off just as tone-deaf as "you're holding it wrong." In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing. And when that doesn't work, the promoter goes into system prompts, MCP, agent files, etc and entire workflows that are required to get it to do the correct thing. It ends up feeling like you're being lied to, even if there's some benefit out there.
There's also the fact that all programming workflows are not the same. I've found some areas where AI works well, but a lot of my work it does not. Usually things that wouldn't show up in a simple Google search back before it was enshittified are pretty spotty.
I suspect AI appeals very strongly to a certain personality type who revels in all the details in getting a proper agentic coding environment bootstrapped for AI to run amok in, and then supervises/guides the results.
Then there’s people like me, who you’d probably term as an old soul, who looks at all that and says, “I have to change my workflow, my environment, and babysit it? It is faster to simply just do the work.” My relationship with tech is I like using as little as possible, and what I use needs to be predictable and do something for me. AI doesn’t always work for me.
Yes, this rings true, it took me over a month to actually get to at least 1x of my usual productivity with Claude Code. There is a ton of setup and ton of things to learn and try to see what works. What to watch out for and how to babysit it so it doesn't go off the rails (quite heavy handed approach works best for me). It's kind of like a shitty, but very fast and very knowledgable junior developer. At this moment it still maybe isn't "worth it" for a lot of devs if productivity (and developer ergonomics) is the only goal, but it is clear to me that this is where the industry is heading and I think every dev will eventually have to get on board. These tools really just started to be somewhat decent this year. I'm 100% sure that in a year or two it will be the default for everyone in a way that you simply won't be able to compete without it at all. It would be like using a shovel instead of an excavator. Remember, right now is the worst it'll ever be.
> In my experience, when people promote AI, its sold as just having a regular conversation and then the AI does thing.
This is almost the complete opposite of my experience. I hear expressions about improvements and optimism for the future, but almost all of the discussion from active people productivly using AI is about identifying the limits and seeing what benefits you can find within those limits.
They are not useless and they are also not a panacea. It feels like a lot of people consider those the only available options.
Personally, EMR has never shaken off the "scrappy" feeling (sometimes it feels OK if you're using Spark), and it feels even more neglected recently as they seem to want you on AWS Glue or Athena. LakeFormation is... a thing that I'm sure is good in theory if you're using only managed services, but in practice is like taking a quick jaunt on the Event Horizon.
Glue Catalog has some annoying assumptions baked in.
Frankly the entire analytics space on AWS feels like a huge mess of competing teams and products instead of a uniform vision.
This person wrote a blog post admitting to tone-deafness in cheerleading AI and talking about all the ways AI hype has negatively impacted peoples' work environment. But then they wrap up by concluding that its the anti-AI people that are the problem. Thats a really weird conclusion to come to at the end of that blog post. My expectation was that the end result was "We should be measured and mindful with our advocacy, read the room, and avoid aggressively pushing AI in ways that negatively impact peoples' lives."
> It's not helping that in the last 10 years a culture of job-hopping has taken over the tech industry. Average tenure at tech companies is often ~2 years and after that people job hop to increase compensation.
I've started viewing developers that have never maintained an existing piece of software for over 3 years with skepticism. Obviously, with allowances for people who have very good reasons to be in that situation (just entered the market, bad luck with employers, etc).
There's a subculture of adulation for developers that "get things done fast" which, more often than not, has meant that they wrote stuff that wasn't well thought out, threw it over the wall, and moved on to their next gig. They always had a knack of moving on before management could connect the dots that all the operational problems were related to the person who originally wrote it and not the very-competent people fixing the thing. Your average manager doesn't seem to have the capability to really understand tech debt and how it impacts ability to deliver over time; and in many cases they'll talk about the "rock star" developer that got away with a glimmer in their eye.
Saw a post of someone on Hacker News the other day talking about how they were creating things faster than n-person teams, and then letting the "normies" (their words not mine) maintain it while moving on to the next thing. Thats exactly the kind of person I'd like to weed out.
But yes, the less of a core building block the specific service is (or widely used internally in Amazon), the more likely you are to run into significant issues.
I would argue that it did, we just did a poor job of measuring it.
Anecdotally, during my childhood I moved from a place that had very little TV advertising to a place with a normal amount and it had a noticeable impact.
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